Robert Fulford's column about
Shinjuku

In one of the underground public spaces in Shinjuku, the largest
railroad station in the world, scores of people live in old
shipping crates. They demonstrate that the Japanese economy has
its failures, like all others, but they're also living proof of
unexpected diversity and tolerance in Tokyo.

These people are homeless, and also ingenious. Having established
themselves on fabulously expensive real estate, they do their best
to live up to it. Many have decorated their boxes with wildly
surrealistic murals. Several have brought in furniture, rescued
from garbage (Japanese tend to discard rather than repair a broken
table or chair). One squatter uses a nearly intact stuffed-leather
armchair, and a floor-standing metal ashtray. Someone else has put
up a pink plastic clothesline. One man sleeps under a handsome
quilt.

There's another surprise in this corner of Shinjuku station.
Beside a handsome florist's, and just outside an up-market
department store, a peddler is selling used comic books for a
dollar apiece. Another guy has wheeled in racks of cheap dresses,
and he's doing serious business.

If suddenly transported to the concourse level of Place Ville Marie
in Montreal or the T-D Centre in Toronto, the homeless and the
peddlers would trigger severe consternation and a flurry of
security guards. In Shinjuku they're just part of the scene.
Japanese society is in some ways tightly controlled, but that's
only part of the truth. Among the secrets of Tokyo--almost the
only city in the modern world that has grown better while growing
bigger--is a certain spontaneity. That's one reason I'm spending
a couple of months here, to study urban life in a place where it's
both amazingly efficient and astonishingly flamboyant.

The Shinjuku district combines the raffish and the sternly
corporate in a way that may be possible only in Japan. Six railway
lines and two subway lines carry some 4-million humans a day. They
can walk directly into four connected department stores, go
upstairs to reach the 15 or so skyscraper office buildings, or turn
in another direction for entertainment. By all the rules, this
should be urban hell--and no doubt unprepared visitors sometimes
experience the oncoming commuters as a terrifying flash-flood of
humanity. But Shinjuku is not hellish. It's often delightful.
One reason is that no central authority guides its existence.

The city government of Tokyo designs satellite business centres and
other large-scale planning exercises but zoning, as North Americans
know it, does not exist in central Tokyo. The city government
doesn't decree that stores go here and not there, or that this
street must have only single-family dwellings. Everything goes
everywhere. As a result, there are really no slums of the
traditional western kind, and no exclusively rich districts.
Stores are even more mixed. The best hairdresser in the district
may be next door to the pinball parlour, and nobody considers that
odd. Workers and owners often live close together, and even
mingle. In a not-bad restaurant the other night, two hard-hat
workers sat on one side of us, and on the other a family whose
clothes spoke of considerable comfort, if not wealth.

Unplanned though they are, most of the districts in Tokyo all
slightly resemble each other. The city grows like an organism,
endlessly replicating itself according to genetically coded
instructions, carried in the DNA of the citizen-entrepreneurs.
Shinjuku, however, remains a special case. It began prospering
when the 1923 earthquake destroyed much of the central business
district. After 1945 it was the core of the black market, and many
black-marketeers eventually turned into legitimate storekeepers.

Farther back, in the 19th century, it was the last local stop on
the road to Kyoto, and the place where travellers sought urban
entertainment before going on their way. It now displays, more
than anywhere else, the Tokyo-style neon assertiveness that makes
Times Square look like an afterthought. On any given evening,
perhaps 100,000 people are enjoying the bars and restaurants.
These establishments are arranged vertically--five or six are
stacked on top of each other, with a sign at the building entrance
listing their names and specialties. One landlord, no doubt the
envy of his peers, achieved what may be a record: for a while he
had 49 bars operating on the eight floors of one building.

Today, if you pick your way through the streets north and east of
the station, you reach Kabukicho, the commercial-sex annex of
Shinjuku. The name reflects long-ago cultural ambitions: a kabuki
theatre was supposed to lift the tone but never got built.
Instead, Kabukicho became Eros Central, where, at peep shows, strip
bars, and audience-participation sex shows, the most outlandish
sexual fantasies of affluent males are made flesh.

One section specializes in love hotels, which rent their rooms by
the hour and decorate them in exotic styles, from Louis XIV to
South Seas. Foreigners imagine they're used mainly for
prostitution and adulterous office affairs, but Tokyo people claim
that at any given moment a room is likely to be filled by two
lovers who are unlucky enough to live in different and distant
suburbs; or even by a married couple briefly escaping the children
and in-laws who share their small apartments. Love will find a
way, even married love, in Shinjuku.